Taking the Long Way Home: Odysseying on the Upper West Side

by Yvonne Vávra

“Oh … a horse? That’s what this is?” My thought exactly. I had walked into a crowd gathering at the corner of 67th and Broadway on Monday and found myself staring straight into the nostrils of what I thought was an angry dinosaur. It was up on its hind legs, in full T. rex fashion. The woman standing next to me agreed. From where we were, the head didn’t look horsey.

But the 40-foot-tall statue blocking a good chunk of Broadway was indeed a horse, a Trojan horse, no less, installed ahead of the New York City premiere of The Odyssey at AMC Lincoln Square.

I’m no expert in Greek mythology, but this seemed like a terribly impractical way to transport warriors. They would have been quite jumbled together in the horse’s butt if it had been standing on its hind legs like that. Not exactly an ideal starting position for the final battle.

Walking away from the scene, I tried to piece together what I could remember about The Odyssey. All the man wants is to get home. But he’s endlessly delayed by transportation problems. He gets lost, has to deal with a bunch of strange characters, and almost nothing goes according to plan.

As a New Yorker, I can relate. I’ve tried getting somewhere on the C train on a weekend. It stalls, it baffles, it’s giving drama. It skips stations either uptown or downtown, forcing you onto routes you never intended to take. Like the winds from Aeolus, it sends you on an entirely unnecessary adventure in the wrong direction before finally allowing you to continue on your way—but not before adding insult to injury by making you pass the station where you started.

And like Odysseus, we New Yorkers have certainly been dealing with our share of epic weather lately, too. Sweltering heat, torrential rains, winds that knock down trees and blow wildfire smoke our way… we hear you, hero. We all just want to head home after whatever New York battle the day had in store for us. Rarely do we have to contend with a nymph or a cannibal, but we have our own reasons for reaching Greek-hero levels of commuter frustration.

Getting home is just one of the many things in our lives that can turn into an epic journey. After all, we’re living in New York City, a monster with at least six heads. Stunning, thrilling, endlessly fascinating, but, oh yes, definitely monstrous. Although, come to think of it, maybe that’s not right. A monster makes you run away. But New York is too irresistible to escape. Maybe it’s more of a Siren.

Finding an apartment and figuring out how to pay for it, moving, raising kids, running businesses, finding community, being sick and trying not to be, making it out of the house on time in the morning, dodging phone zombies, waiting in lines, hunting down a place to pee, navigating strollers, toddlers, and dogs. Or trying to convince your bodega cat to come inside while she looks at you like you’re adorable for actually believing that a mere mortal like you has any say in what a deity does.

There’s more: saying goodbye to a favorite bagel, suffering the roof-of-your-mouth burn after biting too eagerly into the best pizza in the world, or being mocked by promises of cheese cave selections that will never come. The struggles are real.

The Upper West Side has had its own odyssey, too. From swampy land where goats and pigs once roamed to the bustling neighborhood we know today, it has battled more than a few monsters along the way: poverty, corruption, crime, neglect, and periods when it seemed destined to lose its way. In the 1950s and ’60s, the neighborhood had become a place people couldn’t wait to leave. But thanks in no small part to the determination of Upper West Siders who refused to give up on their streets, the neighborhood fought its way back into a place where people wanted to open businesses, raise families, spend long evenings in the park, and debate which of the neighborhood’s many restaurants to try before catching a movie. The Upper West Side found its way home—not to a place, but by becoming one.

Boy, did I come a long way from the horse on Broadway. All I wanted to say was that it looked weird, and that those warriors had enough to deal with without starting the final battle upside down in a horse’s butt.

Yvonne Vávra is a magazine writer and author of the German book 111 Gründe New York zu lieben (111 Reasons to Love New York). Born a Berliner but an aspiring Upper West Sider since the 1990s (thanks, Nora Ephron), she came to New York in 2010 and seven years later made her Upper West Side dreams come true. She’s been obsessively walking the neighborhood ever since.

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